April Fools’ Day Joke? Feds Seize 3-D Printed Gun Website

UPDATE (LRC Blog[1]) — As suggested above, this is an April Fool’s Joke intended to dramatize what could happen if the Regime — which has indeed confiscated web domains in the past[2] — decided to shut down Defense Distributed. The danger with Swiftian satire of this kind is that those who compose the Regime’s enforcement caste, who are utterly ruthless but not particularly bright, will be happy to let their prospective victims do the thinking for them.

Defense Distributed co-founder Cody Wilson.

According to a notice posted on the Defense Distributed website, Homeland Security Investigations and the Justice Department have taken the site down.

“This domain name associated with the website DefenseDistributed.com[3] or Defcad.org has been seized pursuant to an order issued by a U.S. District Court,” the home page of the website states.

The post claims a federal grand jury has indicted several individuals associated with the website and charged them with violating the Arms Control Act, the Undetectable Firearms Act, and other crimes.

Defense Distributed is on open source organization that designed the Wiki Weapon, a firearm that can be downloaded over the internet and printed with a 3-D printer. The project was co-founded by University of Texas law student Cody Wilson “and a group of like-minded friends with strong libertarian leanings – a mix of Ron Paul fans, hunting enthusiasts, and tech-savvy revolutionaries who see the availability of a “printable gun” as potentially upending power structures across the globe,” PCMag.com[4] reported last August.

In October, Wilson and Defense Distributed launched the “Wiki Weapon Project,” an effort to raise $20,000 through crowd-funding to design and release blueprints for an open source firearm. They planned to buy or rent a $10,000 Stratasys 3-D printer. 3-D printers extrude melted plastic objects from CAD designs. Defense Distributed planned to eventually use a less expensive and more widely distributed RepRap printer to print firearms.

In September, Stratasys threatened legal action and demanded the return of the 3-D printer it leased to Wilson. The company said Wilson and Defense Distributed were using the printer for “illegal purposes.” Following the incident, Wilson was questioned by the ATF.

Infowars.com was unable to reach Wilson and confirm if the feds have indeed taken down the website.

Wilson talked with Alex Jones in-studio about the printable gun project on two separate occasions – on January 15 and March 20 of this year.